Liz’s Notebook: Bluffton Middle School ‘shakes it off’ in lip-dub video

Sixth grade is a tough year.

It comes right after students reach expert status at being kids — when they’re too old to believe Santa Claus is real, but are perhaps secretly still a little stunned by the revelation he never was.

Sixth grade happens just seconds before kids are forced to cross into that tumultuous teenage terrain where nine-tenths of thought is now a variation of “If I do/say/wear/think/act like/talk like this and if I talk to/hang out with/like/hate/laugh at so-and-so will the world think I’m weird?”

Sixth-graders are about to be born again and delivered by a more sadistic stork who will unceremoniously drop them on the doorstep of pre-adulthood, where a new infancy awaits them.

Everything feels great and awful at the same time. Friendship becomes both a safe harbor and a political minefield. Love takes hold.

Sixth-graders think no one understands them — even though everyone older than them has experienced this age.

And in the middle of all their pre-teen chaos, their teachers are on the sidelines trying to get them to dance more enthusiastically to some crazy music.

I mean this literally.

At Bluffton Middle School, anyway.

Recently, the sixth-graders finally got to cash in on a prize won this past fall in the PTO’s cookie dough fundraiser.

They far outsold the seventh-graders and therefore got to work with videographer Bobby Thorne of Bobcat Productions and film a lip-dub video featuring a DJ Earworm mash-up of popular songs from 2014 by artists like Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Hozier, Maroon 5 and Iggy Azalea.

This past Tuesday the video premiered at the school.

After watching it several times and running it through my own internal behavior-facial expression detection software, I can with 84 percent accuracy say that the students thought it was the “coolest/lamest (but secretly coolest)” prize ever.

It is an accurate 3  1/2-minute portrait of everything that is wonderful, awkward, goofy, angsty and fun about sixth grade.

The video was filmed over the course of two days so that every one of the sixth grade’s 450 students could take part in whatever way they were comfortable.

Some kids seemed focused on not laughing. Others hammed it up. Many made glorious eye contact with the camera with looks that said “I’m being filmed. I’m being filmed. Oh God, I’m being filmed.”

Principal Pat Freda and and PTO president Maria Robertson involved the school’s clubs and the staff. On the day of the big reveal, students got to see themselves, their friends and even their cafeteria workers get silly.

And they loved it.

“Every day of their lives, somebody is worried about something — what they’re wearing, what someone said,” Freda said. “The camaraderie was there (with this). It was really cute and it came out great. It was great for the whole building.”

This story was originally published April 3, 2016 at 4:30 PM with the headline "Liz’s Notebook: Bluffton Middle School ‘shakes it off’ in lip-dub video."